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Flexner, Abraham

Flexner, Abraham, 1866–1959, American educator, b. Louisville, Ky., grad. Johns Hopkins, 1886. After 19 years as a secondary school teacher and principal, he took graduate work at Harvard and at the Univ. of Berlin. In 1908 he joined the research staff of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and in 1910 wrote a report, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, which is generally called the Flexner Report. It hastened much-needed reforms in the standards, organization, and curriculums of American medical schools. From 1912 to 1925, Flexner was a member of the General Education Board, serving as secretary after 1917. He was director of the newly organized Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1930 to 1939. His influential works on education range from A Modern School (1916) and The Gary Schools (with F. B. Bachman, 1918) to The Burden of Humanism (the Taylorian Lecture at Oxford, 1928) and his widely known study, Universities: American, English, German (1930). His biography of H. S. Pritchett was published in 1943.